Attitudes and moral values: A reasoned action study of behavioral intention in moral behaviors.

摘要

Reasoned action models of decision making have been applied to a wide variety of behaviors in psychology, medicine, and business. However, they have not been widely studied in relation to moral behaviors. Moral behaviors would appear to be an ideal application for reasoned action models, as moral behaviors are by definition reasoned actions.;This study examined the impact of attitudes and values on behavioral intentions in an ethnically diverse sample of college students (N = 189) on 10 moral behaviors presented in vignettes. The moral behaviors included altruistic behaviors, behaviors related to academic honesty, and behaviors dealing with issues of friendship, loyalty, and integrity. Moral values added prediction to behavioral intention over and above the contribution of attitudes and social norms, after partialling out the effects of the demographic variables, for all 10 situations. Attitudes contributed over and above social norms and moral values in only five situations. The initial contribution of moral values versus attitudes tended to be larger and more significant for these behaviors.;An attempt was made to distinguish a valuing group from a nonvaluing group based on the ethical description of the moral point of view (Frankena, 1973). Two methods were used: a two-group split based on the median score on those items and a three-group split based on theoretical grounds. It was hypothesized that moral values would be more important for the valuing group in predicting behavioral intention, while attitudes would be more important for the nonvaluing group; this hypothesis was not supported. However, moral values more consistently added prediction over and above attitudes and social norms for the valuing group than for the nonvaluing group or intermediate group.;Three independent measures of moral values were obtained. These were a statement of perceived moral obligation, adjective semantic differentials, and the Scott (1965) measures. A composite measure based on all three was tested against the individual measures which performed as well or better than the composite measure. When only one measure can be obtained, the moral obligation measure is recommended.